Monday, February 25, 2013

In the aftermath of
the Oscars, it’s probably fair to say that, for Chilean director Pablo
Larraín, the fate of his best
foreign film nominee No could be described by the title of his previous
film, Post Mortem, which I watched on streaming video last week (trailer below). Larraín
himself had acknowledged that the Austrian feature Amour was the odds-on
favorite, but that doesn’t diminish the prestige of being the first Chilean
feature to be a nominee.

I’m still waiting to
see No, which won’t show in the Bay Area until Friday, but I’m hesitant to endorse
Post Mortem which, though it’s drawn praise
from some critics, is a slow-moving film that’s not exactly a feel-good
story. The grim tale of an apathetic coroner’s aide who finds himself
transcribing the autopsies of 1973 coup victims – including that of Salvador Allende
himself – does manage to establish the bleak ambiance of post-coup Santiago,
however.

Like No, the
Norwegian entry Kon-Tiki, with its links to Rapa
Nui (Easter Island) also fell before the success of Amour, but Chile
did take something home from the Academy. Before the awards, I had never even
heard of Chilean-born cinematographer Claudio Miranda, but he won the Oscar for
his work on director Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (which also earned Lee the best
director award).

Miranda, in fact,
appears to have come almost out of nowhere, with a relatively thin resumé –
most of his credits are from commercials and music videos, though he did work
on well-known films such as Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Biographical info is scarce; according
to the Santiago daily El Mercurio, Miranda (born 1965) lived in Valparaíso
until the age of one, when his parents moved to the United States. In fact, the
contact info on his own website says he does not even speak Spanish. Still, his
success and Larraín’s nomination have be morale-builders for Chilean cinema.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

When I first saw the Atacama desert, in the
late 1970s, its vast aridity overwhelmed me, and inspired me to return to Chile to
undertake my M.A. thesis on llama and alpaca herding in the Andean highlands of
Parque Nacional Lauca, east of the city of Arica. To do so, I had a fellowship
from the Inter-American
Foundation, but I also needed an in-country sponsor to be able to carry out
the research. One of my faculty advisors at Berkeley put me in touch with Horacio
Larraín Barros, then a geography professor at Santiago’s Universidad
Católica, who eased my way through official obstacles at a time when Chile was
an international pariah.

In the ensuing years, I have kept sporadically in touch with
Horacio, and have visited him in Antofagasta and in his retirement home at the
village of Matilla,
in the Andean foothills east of Iquique.
While retired, he is not inactive, and he still has an intense devotion to the
Atacama which, in its extreme aridity, is one of the world’s finest
archaeological reserves – nowhere else on Earth are sites and artifacts so
well-preserved.

Recently, though, he’s become concerned about environmental
threats to the Atacama, particularly through the Dakar Rally, which he often
mentions in his Eco-Antropología
blog. I’ve voiced my own misgivings
about Dakar, which has operated in Argentina, Chile and Peru since 2009, when terrorist threats made them abandon Africa.
Long before that, I recall seeing dirt-bike tracks vandalizing the massive
geoglyph known as the “Giant
of the Atacama” (pictured above) and other archaeological sites, and Horacio thinks Dakar
has brought this to a critical stage. For that reason, I asked him permission
to translate and publish a recent open letter he wrote to colleagues, which
appears below.

As an aside, I will toss in the fact that Horacio is a
distant, probably very distant, relative of Pablo Larraín, director of the
Oscar-nominated film No that I discussed in earlier posts.

Horació Larraín Barros on the Dangers of Dakar

Colleagues and friends, it’s time to get involved. This
Dakar Rally is going to continue growing, in the number of vehicles, drivers
and, what’s worse, the number of curiosity seekers either as spectators or
copycats with their own 4WD vehicles who leave an infinity of marks everywhere
on the land. We cannot simply act like ostriches, hiding our heads or saying,
“I already spoke about that.” We need to create a broad alliance of civic
response to express the feelings of the entire scientific and educational
community of the country. We have so far acted timidly and separately. I think
it’s time to undertake collective action: obtain thousands of signatures of
scientists, journalists, lawyers, photographers, visual artists, teachers, and
others. I’m not sure how to organized this network, but it’s imperative to do
so. The Internet is the medium of course, but how to make them listen to our
voices? Does anybody have an answer?

I believe the time has come for everyone who appreciates or
deals directly with environmental conservation (geographers, biologists,
agronomists, architects, anthropologists, archaeologists, geologists,
foresters) need to raise their voices in consensus against this event as it is
developing in today’s Chile.

Pilar
Cereceda has sent me documents proving how the Centro del Desierto de Atacama
(CDA, Atacama Desert Center) has credibly raised its voice since
2009 and 2010. The painful thing is that such documents, sent to the
responsible authorities, have been ignored. And this attitude illustrates how
there are semi-official powers (economic and political) behind all of this, and
that our voices as scientists, teachers and opinion-makers are not being
heard. My position is that we need to
take more decisive action in common.

If anyone has any
clearer ideas of how to articulate, through the network, a serious and
well-grounded response, we would appreciate it. What’s clear to me is that none of
the objections of the Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales (National Monuments
Council), the CDA and other institutions have been taken seriously. Apparently,
the responsible authorities have not even replied. And with respect to any
assessment of the real damages caused and means of mitigating them, we have not
heard a word, so far as I know.

What country are we
in? Will we permit others the luxury of destroying our valuable ecosystems and
cultural heritage with impunity?

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Several months ago, I wrote about director
Pablo
Larraín’s film No, the first Oscar nomination ever for a Chilean feature and,
as the awards event approaches this coming
Sunday, Larraín and other Chileans will certainly be paying attention. I
can’t yet pronounce my own judgment on No, which has not yet reached theatrical
release here in the Bay Area, though I read Larry Rohter’s recent New
York Times profile of Larraín with great interest – No has generated some
controversy in Chile,
though necessarily not for the reasons one might think.

Other than No, I hadn’t paid much attention to the Oscar
nominees but, I recently realized, there’s a second Chile-related film in the
foreign language film category: Norwegian director Joachim Rønning’s Kon-Tiki retells
adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s audacious 1947 expedition from Peru to Polynesia
aboard a balsa log raft. Heyerdahl theorized that humans colonized Polynesia
from Peru
and, by successfully concluding his 101-day voyage across the Pacific, he at
least proved such a voyage was possible.

Later, in 1955-6, Heyerdahl conducted excavations on Chile's Pacific outpost of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in search of evidence for his theories. To his eye, the presence of megalithic platforms such as Ahu Vinapu suggested connections between South America and Polynesia, but the balance of research overwhelmingly contradicts Heyerdahl's speculations. While it's conceivable that pre-Columbian peoples sailed west from Peru, Easter Island was colonized from the east, by Polynesian peoples, though it's conceivable they reached South America first and returned.

Georgia Lee, an archaeologist who has done extensive work on Rapa Nui, probably represents the professional consensus on Heyerdahl. In a recent email, she wrote me "[W]hile I found him incredibly self-centered, he did have an interesting life." Perhaps Heyerdahl's greatest legacy is is his willingness to ask big questions, even if he came up with the wrong answers. I might add that, even as a one-eighth Norwegian (one grandparent), that's as much as I'll grant him.

As for
the Oscars, well, maybe it’s a stretch to link Kon-Tiki too closely to Chile.
The closest the filmmakers got to Rapa Nui itself was the Maldives.

Argentina Travel Adventures App

With more than 30 years living and traveling in Latin America, I write guidebooks to the "Southern Cone" countries - so called because of their shape on the map - of Chile and Argentina. I'm especially interested in the remote, scenic Patagonian region overlapping the two countries. I am the sole author of Moon Handbooks to Argentina; Chile & Easter Island; Buenos Aires, including the city's hinterland and coastal Uruguay; and Patagonia, including the Falkland Islands.
I have a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and have done research in Peru, Chile, Argentina and the Falklands, where I spent a year as a Fulbright-Hays scholar.
My home base is Oakland, California, but I spend five months a year in southern South America. I often stay in Buenos Aires, where my Argentine wife and I have a second home, an apartment in the barrio of Palermo.
I speak fluent Spanish, less fluent German, serviceable Portuguese and desperation French.
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